


Veracity

by GraceEliz



Series: The Eldritch Collection [2]
Category: Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Eldritch, Gen, Maul and Mandalore this fic now has plot, eldritch worldbuilding, mild body horror
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-12-07
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:26:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27314038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GraceEliz/pseuds/GraceEliz
Summary: “I doubt the veracity of my existence daily.”His brother snorts. “Big words for big concepts, brother?”“It’s like – it's like no matter what we can see, with all our advancements, they’re five steps ahead, they’ve already seen and processed and planned and acted, and the only reason we are useful to them is as support, as a mortal brain to check over the plans.”
Relationships: CC-2224 | Cody & Obi-Wan Kenobi, CC-5052 | Bly & CC-2224 | Cody & CT-7567 | Rex, Obi-Wan Kenobi & Anakin Skywalker
Series: The Eldritch Collection [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1992514
Comments: 20
Kudos: 91





	1. Cody

They say Jedi are Otherness, wrong and broken and reformed in a manner that should not be. They say, in whispers in the Undercity, that you can see the worth of a Jedi by their brokenness, by the marks they leave behind. They say all this and more, and the Vode hear it, but they will not speak of it because some things are too private. 

Like this, for instance. The Generals, that is, General Kenobi and General Vos, are curled together, their bodies broken and disjointed. Darkness coils around them, and if he slides his eyes away, he can see the forms of huge, shredded wings, bleeding and oozing and smoking, like lining in a shriek-hawk nest. There are more wings than he can distinguish, and he feels motion-sick trying to focus them, sharp twitches and low ripples of matter only half existing. Through the door dance the younger Generals, Secura and Skywalker: with each step they do not move physically, more of a dance of shadows than of limbs, as if they’re gliding over air – perhaps they are. For a second he thinks General Secura is a corpse, mummified, her beautiful blue skin dry and shrivelled, and General Skywalker is Death itself, a skeleton wearing dripping flesh which burns his eyes with the imagined reek. Then he blinks, and they’re just Jedi again if Jedi can come under such a concept, moving too fast and too smooth and curling unnaturally small into the laps of their Masters. The older men croon to them, croon like he imagines a parent does, but in voices that shiver through the metal of the ship under his feet and echo up his bones. For a heartbeat or two the nest is still. 

He leaves them alone. They say that the Jedi do not take kindly to those who watch them as they brood their offspring; he values his life, his sanity, too much to dare test their kindness. With a soft click the door of their exercise room closes, allowing him finally to brush soot from his face, plucking at his shirt and shedding dust he knows wasn’t there when he first entered with a message for the Generals. 

Cody stands watch as befits his station as Commander, Bly and Rex at his sides. Rex looks sick, eyes screwed up tight shut as Bly whispers to him soothingly. Of course, he remembers, Rex can’t see like they do. The nest of wings is roiling, tonight, boiling and burning; he tastes it, decay on his tongue. Slowly, the dancing wings speed up, like ballerinas in the holos Fox sends, entrancing, beguiling, coaxing him with tender shadows in – in – in to whatever vision his General is possessed by; he sees the world buckle, sees stars between the atoms of the ship, everything is too much and yet too little, it hurts, he tastes blood and hears pain and it’s too much too other too immortal – 

He curls forwards, retching out the taste of salt-water, Bly’s voice loud in his ears, Bly’s palm hard over his eyes. “Eyes closed Rex,” he is saying, “keep your eyes closed. Don’t look. It isn’t for mortals to look upon. Don’t look. Close your eyes.” 

But he can still see it, galaxies and skies imprinted on his eyes and over it all the stench of Death. 

One of the great beings is speaking, howling, he feels it. The grief spreads through his body in rolling waves, rising from the pit of his stomach to release in a whimper lost to the unheard screams of the Jedi. He clings blindly to Bly, drags himself closer and bashes his head into Rex’s and Bly holds them to his chest chanting don’t look don’t look and they wait, wait, a seed in the storm. 

Aayla begins to sing. Ethereal, other, like gold and blue tendrils of a spiralling plant, her song spreads over him, through his mind, relaxing, soothing. Bly’s knees buckle and they all fall, heavily, Bly’s strong hands wrapping around their heads over their ears as he presses their faces into his neck to hide their eyes from what they are too nothing to bear the sight of. When she laughs it rings off his bones, and when Anakin coos like a new-child the deck shivers too. Gradually the storm subsides, until they are no longer buffeted by the wind of the wings-nest. 

“Don’t open your eyes,” breathes Bly, hands going limp, and Cody realises Rex and he are half cradled in their older brother’s lap. “Don’t look. It isn’t over yet.” 

If course it isn’t, Cody thinks, helpless, the moment-long inkling of intangibility still hanging in his stomach, like motion-sickness, hands shaking. Slowly he draws upright, brushing his mouth on his shirt. Cold air, ice-cold, wafts over his bared stomach, making him cringe before he drops his shirt back down, laughter from one of the Generals against his ears. Vos, he thinks, probably; the laughter a bit too dark to be his General, pitched lower, vibrating more than ringing. Blind, he reaches out for his big brother again, craving his grounding presence. 

“You may open your eyes now,” says Aayla, but he waits for a few more breaths just to be sure. They don’t always predict their men’s reactions properly. When he does, the nest is back to the expected slow writhe of the wings, the Generals all four how they should be, safely within the realms of the perceptible. 

His General smiles and Cody retracts his previous tentative assumption on the sight of far too many teeth. And General Skywalker claimed the Duchess Kryze of Mandalore had had a relationship with the General? He shudders to imagine the strength of her. “I apologise. You should not have been caught in the Vision. Are you harmed?” 

“No Sir,” he replies, surprised his voice is still his own. “Merely disoriented, Lady Secura.” 

Her father-Jedi laughs, approving. “Good,” he says, voice a low rasp which raises the hair on his neck once more. Perhaps it was he who screamed. Is that one of the gifts or a curse, he wonders suddenly, to be privy to the sublime, to share such things between brothers? 

“You work with Jedi,” Fox says, leaning back against the wall. They're high enough up that the air is more or less fine, free of the smogs of the lower levels, the brightest of the stars just and so visible above them. “What’s it like?” 

“Terrifying,” he answers, “I doubt the veracity of my existence daily.” 

His brother snorts. “Big words for big concepts, brother?” 

“It’s like – it's like no matter what we can see, with all our advancements, they’re five steps ahead, they’ve already seen and processed and planned and acted, and the only reason we are useful to them is as support, as a mortal brain to check over the plans.” He takes a breath, hands trembling as he remembers the taste of sublimity he’d been cursed with. “I don’t think it’s a blessing, really.” 

His brother tugs him in close, wrapping his arm over his shoulder. “The truth of all things, my brother, is that when a gift and a responsibility is given, it is always weighted down. I am away from the fighting, but the emotional stress is constant.” Fox spits something out. “It’s awful.” They sit a minute in total silence, surrounded by the hum of speeders and the throb of the city’s life below them. “You know, you never have told me what it’s like.” 

What is like, Cody asks himself. Do the words exist? “General Skywalker is...” 

He is the taste of old ashes. 

He is the smoke that rises off the pyre, and the smear on the hip where you wipe decay from your hand. 

He is the dried-up-crusts and flakes in the bread bin, the soft-old of forgotten cakes. 

He is the reek of death. 

He is nothing, a void in the shape of a boy. 

He is a star in the Force, an emptiness. 

He is a contradiction: 

All that Is, and all that Shall Be, and what Shall Be is Death. 

One day Cody believes he will lose himself in Anakin, in his General’s child who encompasses all he understands of the word “Be”. He will look where he knows the Child to be, but what he sees will be a galaxy, the expanse of stars, the explosion of distant stars. He will see darkness and light and shadows and glinting, he will see nothing. 

He is the Nothing, Anakin Skywalker. 

When his brother’s last breath leaves. 

The final reaching stare beforehand. 

The last half-thought urge before sleep, before the Eternal Rest. 

“He is All That Is, and all that Is is Life, and yet too he is All That Will Be, the definitive. The Void,” he finally says, losing himself to the memories of it. “He is the Abyss.” He shrugs, helpless to provide more words, unable to voice the concepts he himself barely has an understanding of even to his batchmate. “I don’t understand.” 

Fox doesn’t react, merely tugs Cody into his lap like he’s a Little afraid of the rain. “That’s alright. We are not supposed to.”


	2. Maul

Maul sits back in his stolen throne, considering the boy in front of him. He stands pale but tall, regal, every inch the sole remaining family of the Mandalorian Duchess whose legacy he is intent on spoiling. The lie, he considers with grudging respect, was a clever one, shrouded in truth and the traditions of this people regarding families. Adopting her “nephew”. It was well done – and ballsy. Very ballsy. But then, he smirks to himself when Savage stalks up to his right hand and plants himself tree-like and immovable, that was why he came for Mandalore. Of all the wide-spread universe, the Mandalorians would be the best to assist in his scheming, the hardest warriors in the galaxy. And this one, particularly, carries the advantages of the blood of Otherness. “Tell me, son of Kenobi and Kryze, what you know of your father.”

The boy blinks, blue eyes slow and languid and huge in his sharp Kenobi face, like one of the Force-consuming Ysalamari lizards Maul has encountered, or a slowly trickling pool in a forest. “I know nothing beyond what we all know. He is a Jedi. He is a great General. He is kind and strong, and he killed you.”

He snarls infuriated, showing all his broken teeth in base grimace, despising how far he has fallen – and oh, what a Fall it was. Smoke trickles from his fangs, oozing malice like pus from a wound, straining his throat and tainting the air they must breathe. “He failed,” snarls the stolen son of Dathomir, letting himself show just a little, just enough to frighten this mortal human, wings and talons and gaping wounds in rotting flesh.

The Kryze-Kenobi boy merely tips his head and his eyes boil blue, like Dathomiran swamplands under a full moon, barely a brush of his sire’s Otherness about him. Does he know, Maul wonders, just how it is the Jedi harness their potential? Does the boy meditate like his father does, sinking into the Force until it colours his every breath, tones his every heartbeat? Does he do as the Dark ones do, reach into the Force and attempt to harness it? “Did he.”

Suddenly almost incandescently enraged, longing for the stability to be able to strike with the speed he once possessed, Maul indicates for Savage to carry the child into his holding cell with a snarl, fuming at this wish-ling and his faith in his absent father. No, Kenobi had not failed to kill Maul. He had come back, and he didn’t know why. It was for this, he believed. For revenge, for the chance to bring the greatest bastion of the Light down into the muck like every other puny insubstantial mortal being.

And yet.

_The Duchess cries and the Jedi fears,_ whispers the Son, the Dark, in his ear, cold slinking down his spine, curling about his scarred waist. _How much further will you lead him into my grasp? How far do you think you can make him walk?_

“I will not fail,” Maul swears with quiet resolve and reins in his display of Otherness until it is only sensation, like knives beneath his skin. “The boy has potential; he will Fall soon enough.”

_They are coming,_ sings the Dark in glee, retreating from his body into a soft whisper at the base of his skull, _coming to Fall!_

He shivers, stricken by the sensation of crawling insects along his scars. “So you have told me.”

_Take the starbright-boy too,_ croons the Dark like a ringing blade in the night _, take them both!_

Maul tips his head, considering, purses his lip at the idea. The starbright-boy’s Master – parent or brother or both – has killed him once, surely taking the Kryze-child is enough to bring him in if the knowledge of such colossal failure is not? Surely taking that Skywalker boy – young man, now, not such a boy – is overkill tantamount to taking down an eopie with an anti-airship cannon, now that Kenobi knows Maul is on Mandalore, this most-precious of retreats?

_No, I wish for them both, take them both take them both and do so immediately!_

He flinches under the barrage of biting bitter cold against his brain, waving Savage and his cloying concern away. “A new plan, brother,” he manages to say though his teeth cut into his tongue and his blood tastes like the lurch of hyperspace. “How do you do in hunts?”


End file.
